Many students and researchers struggle to write and communicate their research in a way that is both intuitive and convincing, especially, but not limited, to a cross disciplinary setting. This course will help prepare students to write more clearly, make it easier for their audience to understand what they are saying, and to train students to offer enough support in the direct and indirect arguments that they make within the context of their research and academic writing. These writing skills will be applied in this course to write effective Personal Statements, as well as general proposals.

This course will also focus on training students to analyze, create, and support arguments in their academic writing. Students will learn to develop their critical thinking skills and incorporate these skills into their own writing, with the goal of well-presented logical writing within the context of a research article and persuasive writing in general. In addition, this class will also focus on writing clarity, style, and flow.

Emphasis will also be placed on communicating research through both speaking and writing as a way to facilitate understanding and communication. This will involve conducting audience/reader analysis, using more active sentence constructions, incorporating syntactic and semantic clarity, utilizing progression and transition strategies, as well as evaluating overall language and jargon usage.

In addition, students will learn to develop their critical reading skills in order to present and support research arguments in writing. Critical reading will involve multiple ways of evaluating academic arguments for clarity and logic, while also identifying any logic and argument shortcomings in student’s own writing.

In terms of logic, this course primarily focuses on Informal logic, as well and Deductive and Inductive critical thinking skills. These elements of logic will focus and be adapted for an academic writing and oral communication setting.

This class will be conducted through a combination of lecture and group work. While there will be a lecture component for each class, this class relies heavily on group work as a means for students to apply the content that is presented in class, and also for the exchange of ideas and opinions. This exchange of ideas will be based on class tasks and activities, but in addition to this, students will be providing peer feedback to each other. This peer feedback will focus on how well the students communicate (through writing and/or speaking) their research, thought process, and their position and arguments.

This course will be taught completely in English and will focus on both writing in the sciences as well as the humanities.